The Verdict

Jury duty. My service has precisely coincided with the longest stretch of sunshine this winter. We can tell because someone reported a little patch of it in a high window.

It is in fact an awesome responsibility to have someone's fate in one's hands; certainly in a criminal case, but even in a case like this one, where someone's counting on fifteen million bucks to live on, and the other entity is merely a hospital that could pony that up in an afternoon if they bill enough aspirins. We are taking this seriously.

In a very disturbing element for your correspondent, I must report that for eight days now I have been leaning toward whichever side spoke last. The closing statements should be a dead heat.

This is upsetting, though. Perhaps it just speaks to the skills of the lawyers. Perhaps it just means I have an open mind. In fact I do have an open mind, but once it starts to fill up with testimony, there should be some precipitate in the brain pan. What if having an open mind just means there's a bunch of air going through there?

This condition does not apply to politics. I have firm opinions in the realm of national and world affairs. I stand ready to inflict them on you at a moment's notice. Not only do I have opinions, but I know they're right, even the ones that are uninformed, and I know which people are wrong wrong wrong. If it's late at night and I'm one beer over, I'll let them the hell know, too.

I think I remember a time in my life when I could throw out an opinion in public, and it could be volleyed about, and sometimes my opinion would be shown to be over the line and sometimes it would dink the net and drop fair. Everyone claps politely and we try to make some more points.

That never happens anymore.

Now I throw out an opinion in good faith, and discover that my debate opponent has been inseminated by fallout from passing chemtrails, resulting in an involuntary measles vaccination. And that this experience will inform every aspect of his world view.

Or that she is single-mindedly devoted to assuring that a series of perfectly dreadful events will occur in a precise order, leading up to the Rapture for herself and her identical friends.

Or that the person is just wrong. Even before I assemble my bullet points and trot out my data and proofs, I know the other person is wrong. Because he or she is unkind.

That's the tell.

Kindness is not the same as naiveté. It does not preclude disapproval. Kindness is a willingness to recognize the humanity of others. People are not kind who feel safe only when they have constructed barricades and identified enemies, even if they have to make them up. Kindness is a thin thing if it applies only to identifiable members of their own tribe. If a person falls easily into gross generalizations about any group, they are lazy, fearful, and unkind. And wrong.

If you're not sure what to think, you start by cultivating kindness. You can always hang 'em high later.

Cone Head

There has been a terrible miscarriage of justice in the state of Oregon, which is one of the states Mr. Gary Schwirse was in when he tipped over and fell six feet onto a concrete ledge and injured himself. A federal appeals court has denied his claim to workers' compensation benefits. We should pay attention because this kind of thing could have happened to any one of us, or possibly just me.

Mr. Schwirse, a longshoreman, began his day first thing with a couple beers for Morning Mouth, and then went to work, where he consumed three more to take the edge off. He followed up at lunch with another five beers and eased into the afternoon shift with a pint of whiskey. It was during a well-earned attempt to pee over the dock railing at the end of his shift that he fell over the railing and onto the concrete ledge, fortunately landing on his head, which he wasn't using at the time. He demanded workers' comp when his coworkers variously reminded or informed him that he might have tripped over an orange safety cone.

It is a travesty that in this day and age employers are still allowed to get away with placing safety cones in the workplace, in spite of the known hazards. I have personally tripped over safety cones at least three times, and find them second in danger only to the random removal of known doors and hallways. Who among us has not been walking, deep in thought, and negotiated a tight right turn only to find that the door or hallway has been replaced by a wall?

Just me?

Well the safety cone thing is bad. There you are on a well-worn path to the room where the donuts are and there, for no reason, in an area previously occupied by air, is a safety cone. Someone has placed it there to mark the location of a patch of mopped floor that had evaporated hours ago, and down you go. The cones have proliferated along with the lawyers until now you are forced to constantly look where you're going, an activity that interferes with my rich inner life, and I say it's time we put an end to this nonsense.

Speaking of going, that is what Mr. Schwirse was doing when he did a header over the rail. This, at least, has never happened to me, as a mail carrier. At worst, I have only tipped over and rolled a few feet to the right. There might have been rhododendron damage.

When the judge failed to stand up for workers and rejected the claim that the safety cone had occasioned his injury, Mr. Schwirse's counsel suggested that the concrete was at fault, using the logic that his suffering would have been much less had the ledge been made of memory foam. The judge rejected this gambit, too.

Mr. Schwirse, who responsibly waited until the end of his shift to whiz off the edge of the dock, might have hurt his case somewhat by revealing that his job was to collect safety cones, which might lead some to believe he shared some of the blame by not noticing or collecting the one he tripped over. But the end of your shift is the end of your shift. Start picking up cones on your own time and before you know it you're on the road to losing Donut Day, and maybe your health benefits, too.